skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've nailed it with your first paragraph.

That is the scheme. It's old. It still works. The web, like TV, is absolutely perfect for this scheme. The audience that includes people who would pay for this sort of advice is the one that watches TV at odd hours, and they are now increasingly surfing the web.

It is the rough equivalent of the infommercial.

While it may be theoretically possible, no one is going to make five figures per month except the person selling advice on how to make five figures per month.

I don't know how these sellers sleep at night. Certainly they can do well. But they are _deliberately_ preying on the weak. If that's the type of "business" you want to run, go for it.

But it has always been pure sleaze and will continue to be so for the forseeable future.
Some stupid drupal issue. Will try to fix that. For now
you can send query/suggestion at avabodh02{AT}gmail.com
Running untrusted code someone has uploaded is risky.
Unfortunately, the term "quota" has been uber-toxic in US politics for the past twenty+ years. So ... what is known as PC[1] (which I wish could just be called "common decency"[2], or "non-douche-ism") ... becomes an indispensable (if thin) lever.

[1] Interesting, to me, because I think of it as starting in the late 1980s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
[2] Credit to Vonnegut
This is a complete misunderstanding of every single facet of privilege. I honestly hope you feel less persecuted someday; may I suggest looking up some statistics to assure yourself of your particular demographic's dominance in your preferred field?
We still have yet to see what comes of it in 2014. I'm not hopeful, but the foundations have been laid for much worse that produced reasonable results.
Hey guys, this is my new app, it lets Dropbox users archive or backup their files. It's built with Amazon Glacier (and S3 and Simple Workflow Service). Feedback very much appreciated, I'll be around to answer questions for a few hours.

I did post this a few days ago as well but I messed up the timing and it sunk without a trace. Hoping people don't mind too much if I try again!
I made this quickly after seeing how the "I am hacking" chatroom was jumping.
would be great if we could keep this going. HN people need a place to hangout
Let's look at a few examples:

* Amy Hoy's 30x500: An alternative to the "pick an idea, build, then sell" mentality. She's poured a LOT of research (trust me on this one) into her course, along with what's obviously worked well for her.

* Patrick McKenzie's latest course: A distillation of the stuff he usually advises his consulting clients to do. Read through his blog, it's knowledge he's accumulated over years of trial and error.

* My book or workshop: I've consulted for a while, and bootstrapped a fairly successful consultancy ($1mm+/year), and I also spent months reading through ridiculously boring CXO-level books on pricing tactics and strategy. I've distilled this down into something easily consumable for a freelance consultant.

You're buying our expertise (largely the result of our trial and error and the losses we incurred) and any ancillary research we did.

If you value your time, and think - you know, that spending $49 on a book that in 2 hours covers strategies and tactics related to pricing freelance services is better than the alternative - namely, cobbling all that information together yourself - then you're a good candidate to be a customer.
FWIW, they're going to be using a different engine soon.
Why is Y Combinator focused on relatively young entrepreneurs? [1] Because they have fewer worries about health care and similar long term costs. If health care costs were not an issue, one major barrier for older entrepreneurs would be removed.

[1] YC selects for younger people: they need to be willing to relocate for 3 months, work on a high-risk project for most of their waking hours, and otherwise dedicate their lives to success. Does PG keep stats on age of founders? Age of successful founders? Any correlation?
Debt collectors constantly break the law when collecting for auto debt as well; does that mean the government should pay for people's cars?
Obamacare increases the burden on employers, and generally prohibits high-deductible health insurance policies that are actually insurance (as opposed to comprehensive policies which cover minor and predictable expenses). It's probably still better than the status quo, but it means we lose the option of going with a plan that's actually good like Wyden-Bennett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_Americans_Act).
DNA Lounge is famous because jwz.
FBI Warning : New Malware attacking Android smarphones
Right now we have neither - not sure why we couldn't have both. "Single payer" with adjunct private policies for those who want more than what the basic system provides.
I guess I can see how they could control for differential access to preventative care resulting in ER visits with worse outcomes, or dilution by people with insurance visiting the ER with less serious problems... Even how they could control for early treatment in an ambulance vs a drive in.

But I'm interested in how they controlled for hesitance to go in the first place delaying treatment? Same condition, but you spent an extra half hour deliberating before going.
She hated it. I managed to salvage full credit by saying "but the answer you were looking for was insertion sort."
Thank you! Well said, arkitaip.
There is some history of irc channels associated with HN, consider visiting ##hackernews or #startups on irc.freenode.net instead.
Advance Wars 2 (US) crashed when I played it.
They didn't have ambulances in your cousin's town?
Postmates Tackles Grocery Stores
This applies directly to the conditions of workers in the US. The kind of uninsured workers we discuss on this board are young and healthy. The bad outcomes are rare. But they do happen. If you expect your young coders to work without benefits and little pay, you should know the risks you have placed on them.
As I understand it, that's exactly what it is.
Google search volume down for the first time in history
This looks really awesome! Are you planning on releasing this soon?
> It's good software engineering.

> The reasonable case for multi-person editing of a document is several people at the max editing the document concurrently.

On the other hand, I suppose it would be good UI design to not show that warning to everybody who only have read-only access to the document,
This is quite common in any area of work, not just programming: the more you become "the man", the less time you'll have to do the thing you love, since you're likely to spend it administrating and coordinating a lot of people to keep the ball running. I guess the trick is getting to also enjoy this other side of things - or have the luck to start off with a partner whose main passion is the business side of things...
The other poster stopped acting like a mature adult, and I do feel this is entirely out of place on HN, but hey, I've been up for 20 hours so why not.

Food is pretty much already included. Food stamps, soup kitchens, etc. Almost nobody in the US or any other first world country will die of hunger without options to abate it. I wouldn't mind having everyone in a country just get a foot stipend from taxes though. While I am traditionally libertarian, I have this strange thing about the fundamental belief one of the reasons we erect society and prosperity is to attempt to eliminate the inherent inequalities and mortalities born into our existence.

I live in PA, and I know there is an electric subsidy on households below the median per capita income. I'm pretty sure if you went unemployed you could get an electric rate around 1 cent a kilowatt, which is around 20% the normal rate.

Healthcare is an outlier, in that if (by circumstances beyond your control) you need others to save your life, without health insurance you are basically getting a free bankruptcy card. And there goes any credit for anything for a decade at least. If your house is on fire, the fire department will come and attempt to extinguish it and save your life without footing you a bill. Police don't charge you for their emergency services.

So should those whose houses burn have to pay the bill for firefighters putting it out? (fire insurance on the house is independent of it, and I mean that instead of everyone paying taxes to cover the costs of fires, individuals pay when they possess something firefighters need to be called for).
It's especially a nightmare on Windows with all the extra services it installs that start with up with the OS. Does anyone actually use Bonjour? The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime, it runs like molasses even on the latest and greatest hardware, you also seem to have to resign-in to your apple account every time the software even thinks about doing anything. One of the worst offenses is it won't monitor folders for new music, if you decide to acquire music outside of iTunes you have to manually tell it to rescan for music each time. iTunes is an offense against humankind and will probably be what starts WWIII.
Good idea, but maybe we can move this to an IRC Channel and promote it on Reddit and other websites to get more attention.
Oh, I get it. User-uploaded Django models. Makes sense.
"Elements can never beat a class selector, even if you pile them on"

Uhh.. what about classes? Can you pile classes on to beat ids?

Can you pile ids to beat inline? (Well that kinda doesn't make sense).
thx.. it will get released sometime 1.5 to 2 months from now.
As a related data point, I had a post go viral today on Google+ (~500 +1s, 100 shares) [1] and after about an hour, the most inane comments started piling on.

"hello"

"hi friendz"

"hi"

"Every one how is the day?﻿"

"What's the topic for today, can any one tell me? Please!"
etc etc

I can explain the timing. It presumably hit "What's Hot" so they all saw it. But like OP, I don't know what to make of it. Maybe one of the OP's theories, maybe all of them.

1. https://plus.google.com/106413090159067280619/posts/ZFTKZQfj...
His reasons were not due to a lack of a will to live, but due to a desire not to harm others through burdening them with his debt. An ambulance ride alone can cost upwards of $800 in the US.
Pokerrabbit.com
Vistaapp.com
both claimed. Bloggateway, greymobile, acourses and partnerart still free.
Free speech does not mean speech without responsibility.

Freedom of speech refers to the right to speak without fear of government reprisal or punishment. It has nothing at all to do with how private entities conduct themselves in regards to the speech of other private entities. People replying to your comment don't understand this, and seem to think freedom of expression equally applies to speech on a privately owned website. It doesn't.
The Fallacy of “Follow Your Passion”
Optimizing Ruby on Rails applications with NodeJS | PerfectLine Blog
Show HN: Hacker News IRC channel
Thanks for your comment. I agree that 'Meditation' means many things to many people. Thus, I started my comment above with "In my opinion" which makes the whole comment subjective to my experience. The definition I give above, refers to the Patanjali Yoga Sutra definition of Dhyana, which is essentially an extremely old technical document related to meditation and yoga.

Something to consider, is that there seems to be some confusion on this thread between meditative practices and meditative states etc. This would be like comparing the act of drinking a lot of alcohol with the drunkenness that results. There are many different types of alcohol and varying means of consuming it but that state that results from its consumption is somewhat common to most people.

In my comment above, I was referring to Meditation as a state of consciousness where the sense organs and mind become highly introverted. In that state the mind slows way down and comes to a stop.
You should be running your own in-house anyways.
Awesome idea. Great for real-time discussions about HN posts.
> Please explain how content that is inherently very expensive to create (such as big movies and games) would be funded under the proposed system.

Kickstarter-like model? This has been shown to work.

Donate and get your name in the credits, get included in the production process, get a vote, etc., or some other perks.
all nextgen game consoles would rely on amd for cpu (2 of them) and gpu (3 of them)
My impression is that the theory is not just about silicon, but specifically about windows. Seems to require a smooth silicon-based non-conducting material, with air on both sides and a charge differential between them.
The item is behind a paywall.
agreed, hopefully we can keep this going
I was immediately reminded of Rich Hickey's talk, hammock driven development: http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586.

It sounds like he was onto something with the waking mind being being prone to finding local maxima, but the background/sleeping mind being good for branching out and finding other solutions.

edit: Actually it looks like he cited scientific american talking about the sleeping brain finding relations between problems, I only remembered the bits about strengthening memory.
I found roughly the same thing comparing apache logs with google analytics.

A direct conspiracy would be a pretty bad business model, but fake friend and spam disseminating accounts may be less likely to be canceled if bots or minions keep them active with bogus activity.

If ~80% of profits is really from bots, then it's hard for fb not to turn a blind eye to these accounts.
I agree. Death is always an option, and sometimes it's the best (equivalently "least bad") one. Despite the title, the article actually argues from the point of view that death is never an option. This is a harmful black-and-white view. If you assign effectively infinite disutility to death then you can no longer say, for instance, that a painful death is worse than a painless one. Surely we can all agree that this is the wrong way to go about decision-making.
Some candidates in these ten pages: http://thisisindexed.com/category/women/ ?
Great read. I once did a project for S60. Initially I thought to use C++ but its implementation for this platform required to learn a lot of platform-specific quirks. I ended up implementing the project in Python. I'm really happy that I did not waste my time on learning the platform. This rises the obvious question: how to choose a platform that really deserves the effort to study it?
The fundamental question here is, if you pick a random vector going outward from the earth, what us the probability of that vector intersecting a star? If it is near 100%, then you would expect a bright sky at night, and if you don't see one then you have a paradox.
What about #startups?
But it has always been pure sleaze and will continue to be so for the forseeable future.

I disagree. It's like condemning all 'learning to program' products because of the terrible 'Learn Java in 3 hours for idiots' books.

Sales, marketing, running startups, etc. are teachable skills. Learning those skills helps enormously. Figuring out what's a good source of learning is, like in any other field, a job of research and reference chasing.

I wish some of these things had been around ten years ago so I didn't have to learn stuff the hard way ;-)
The real point is that the posts are of little interest to them, so why are they liking them in droves?
Well that's a complete strawman if ever I saw one...
So if someone writes code that makes heavy use of nonlibrary python code in multiple threads, you're automatically going to blame them as writing in the style of some other language? That's pretty No True Scotsman.

I'm not arguing for or against the GIL here but it's something to keep in mind. "Threads run concurrently" is misleading. And it's not a matter of being pythonic, the GIL isn't even a python feature.
Paradoxes and assumptions aside, is it literally true that there is a star at the end of every vector you can draw from my eyeball into space? I understand it's true if you assume the universe is infinitely large, but we know that's not true, right?
Ugh, now we're going to have to stretch our already practically non-existant political capital even further to defend against this shit. Do the CCC and the Pirate Party have official positions on this?

Edit: In case they don't (and that's what it looks like from some cursory googling), here are some talking points that might be effective. Disclaimer: I'm not European, so I probably have a bad intuition about what would play over there.

* This measure is a form of trade protectionism that will result in retaliation from the US (think import duities). That retaliation will harm EU companies more than American ones, since the US is far larger than any single market in the EU

* Many EU startups have grown in the US market first, even though they are based in the EU (soundcloud and last.fm come to mind). Higher costs across borders would at best limit new companies like these to their home markets and at worst kill them on the vine.

* Popular services like Google and Twitter (Facebook seems touchy, so I would leave them out) have no domestic alternatives, so jeopardizing access would harm consumers.
Hacker News already has IRC, it's #startups isn't it?
I don't think so. If I have an idea _and_ I am able and willing to develop the product, I have more to offer than just an idea. Product development is a job. Having ideas isn't.

I see no reason why software developers and marketing people shouldn't start a startup together. Both have something valuable they can contribute.
Unified logging with Node JS and Syslog
That is the point where I stopped reading.
That's not the official Hacker News IRC channel
I have to wonder how many of the members of government pushing this also happen to be shareholders of telecoms companies. (I long for the day somebody builds such a graph of all influential people so such questions could easily be answered).
I'm sure there are lots of people like me who are not interested about startups at all but come here for the "hacking" part of hacker news. I do realize that hacker news once used to be called startup news and is run by a startup incubator, but to me this is just a great place for technical articles and discussions.
This is the opposite of what I expected from the title. (It's perfectly consistent with the title, of course; I ran with the wrong interpretation.) Different strokes for different folks, I guess. My personal feelings about this are:

1) I'm still alone

2) I now have a new distraction from hacking

I prefer to go to a coffee shop and sit in silent solidarity with a bunch of other people who are trying to concentrate and get something done. (Even if they're just posting status updates to Facebook, they look serious, and I can pretend they are are working hard.)
Github may have been part of the reason, but the support of Linus/kernel devs plus the very active mailing list probably had a lot to do too. I knew people that were git fanatics prior to github. Git was also the vcs of choice for Ruby / Rails developers.
Other things that are very important to companies:

* Taxes - both on labor, capital gains, value added, and so on.

* Labor laws.

* Industry specific rules and regulations.

There's a lot of material there. While I agree it's all important stuff... it tends to lead to discussions about politics that go around and around.
So are you saying that developers and marketing people should never start a startup together? Is that really too simple to be "life"? I don't believe that. Sure there are more entrepreneurial functions than product development and marketing. That doesn't preclude some division of responsibilities.
Just like me.
This is a great article! It reminds me of my former boss at the startup I used to work at. He wasn't your stereotypical startup founder. He already had a successful engineering career in the private and public sector. By that time he had three kids and a mortgage. And he made it work. Occasionally on a weekend he'd pop with a kid in tow, hoping to get some work done before a soccer practice, but it never created a problem.
Building Web Platform’s Infrastructure
Canada, where the competition is even less.
Is there a way to upload saves, so I can do things like automatically have the Legendaries? Yeah, cheating, but whatever :)
That simply doesn't make sense. The OrbComm satellite was almost sure to burn up if they didn't launch it from a higher orbit. If the only risk was to the satellite, then go high or go home.

The problem was a (very small, almost surely overstated, but there nonetheless) risk to the ISS. From Orbcomm's press release: "the rocket did not comply with a preplanned International Space Station (ISS) safety gate to allow it to execute the second burn."
...they're now effectively bankrolled by a company with much deeper pockets and motivation to win then if they stuck with Meego or Symbian.

I think this is a good point that's completely overlooked by the other doomsayers in this thread.

Nokia : Microsoft :: General Motors : the US government. Having alienated every other hardware OEM of note, Ballmer can't afford to let Nokia fail. Their relationship is strategic, not tactical.

This wouldn't have escaped Elop's attention when he had to decide between betting the house on Android versus Windows Phone.
Your post is really long, so I feel obligated to up vote it. Can you give a summary?
Stallman On Unity Dash: Canonical Will Have To Give Users' Data To Governments
I actually thought his point was a good one. The alternative may have been putting the kids in day care and actually being in an office. But instead, he gets to go to the park and, yes, respond to a few emails, but at least he's there in some capacity, and probably will have time once he's done with the emails. With the office/day care, the probability of having any time with them is 0.
These comments doesn't make sense for spam (unless their account links to a lot of spam?) I wonder if it's non-english speakers trying to practice their english.
It's an awesome app. Saw this and thought that it should be on HN. Where are you based out of? Maybe we can catch up sometime and I can actually use the app in action :)
This is just from my limited experience trying to develop mobile software around 2002 (J2ME and investigating Symbian) and developing for Android and iOS nowadays.

I developed 3 apps on J2ME at that time and investigated Symbian. The impression I got of Symbian of that time was that it was painful to develop against. J2ME was less painful but very, very limited. Think no animation support, just bitmaps, and I have to write my own game run loop, collision detection, etc.... This was most probably due to the limited hardware of the time but nonetheless, it was primitive.

In comparison, iOS and to a lesser extent Android are basically fully featured OSs with mostly full exposed functionality. iOS gives you core graphics, opengl es, core text, core animation, grand central dispatch, networking, etc... Android gives you views, animation, background tasks, activities, intents, etc...

The distribution model was also broken. If you wanted something distributed, you had to basically go with a carrier. There were attempts at an app store but there were not successful.

Contrast this with the App Store, Google Play, and iOS enterprise development program where you don't have to go begging to a carrier to get your app distributed.

To summarize, Symbian was coming from a previous era and had no chance. If you compare RIM's situation to Nokia's, I bet you will see a similar chart.
This seems intriguing. But it raises questions: Is not Dropbox based on AWS storage? Therefore if AWS goes down...

Secondly, given that Dropbox has native version control (via its web interface) how is a backup with tidy.io on Amazon Glacier a benefit?

Just saying... if tidy.io wasn't AWS-based, then you'd really have something here.